The present invention pertains to removable single and double car garage door screens that are simple and inexpensive to make, install and store, and are easily opened for pass-through, without unnecessary zippers, dowel rods, and other costly components.
Garage door screens have been successfully employed for many years. When the first garage door screens were demonstrated, the application as a pest barrier was obvious to all. The capability to allow in air and light, without also allowing in insects, proved quite useful. The West Nile virus carried by mosquitoes in the United States has made garage door screens all the more important in recent years. Early systems were based upon a tight enclosure around the perimeter of the garage door frame using expensive means such as elongated channels connected to the garage door frame holding border strips attached to the screen, or magnetic means or adhesive Velcro® strips, and the like, installed in similar manner. Other means of securing garage door screens employed a plurality of fasteners such as hooks, secured about the periphery of the garage door opening. They became more effective when they were combined with dowel rods inserted into hems sewn in at the bottom of the screen for weighted adherence to the garage floor and which were also used as spindles for rolling up the screen for storage. Other screens used vertical elastic strips sewn into the fabric of the screen for stretching the screen material to accommodate variations among garage door opening sizes.
The recent trend has been toward offering greater varieties of screen attributes, such as providing various screen colors and degrees of ultraviolet (UV) protection, various thicknesses and counts of strands per square inch that vary greatly in cost. Some screens provide more privacy, allowing one to see out, but not in. For instance, a light double car garage screen may have as few as 12 by 12 strands per square inch and would provide no privacy, but might only cost $30.00 to purchase from the manufacturer. Whereas, a much heavier screen of the same size that may be 20 by 24 strands per square inch and which may provide 80-90% UV protection may provide complete privacy from the outside looking in and be easy to see out from the inside, might cost into the hundreds of dollars. Thus it is becoming ever more difficult to manufacture garage door screens to accommodate the different available types of screen offerings and sizes, and to accommodate differing requirements of each consumer in a cost effective manner.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a clear, and now long felt, need for an inexpensive to produce, customizable garage door screen (hereinafter “screen”, “garage screen” or “garage door screen” will be used as equivalent expressions) that is made large enough to fit any single or double car garage door frame built in the United States, but is flexible enough to maintain a tight, stable enclosure around the perimeter of the garage door frame and which allows ingress and egress without expensive zippers or elastic strips that must be sewn-in in advance. What is further needed is a method of storing the garage door screen without additional installed components or which might require substantial effort and storage space. A simple garage door screen made of a minimum of component parts that accomplishes all the aforementioned objectives is a need yet to be satisfied.